


Cages Felis Catus

by MeltyRum



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Persona 3
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27392362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeltyRum/pseuds/MeltyRum
Summary: Wherein, for no particular reason, Aigis is a robot cat living with Catwoman who is friends with Nightwing.
Kudos: 5
Collections: Generic_Roleplay_Cyberpunk





	Cages Felis Catus

While it made her feel a bit guilty to present a constant drain on Selina’s data and electricity budget, she was nothing but grateful for her roommate’s new habit of leaving a virt display droning on at all times, displaying the news of the day when it wasn’t being interrupted with notices about the various wonderful products that were available, right _now_ , to be purchased by any interested consumer with a credit chit. That wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t the same marketing for the same handful of products every day.

Some things never changed, though, it seemed—even without any real memories of her own, commercial fatigue was a feeling that _this_ cat was already quite familiar with.

Unfortunately, even the near-constant stream of information flowing through Selina’s apartment had not provided any clues as to where this “AIgis”—as Nightwing put it—had come from. Everyone’s best guesses so far seemed to imply that she potentially belonged to Kirijo Corporation—or perhaps even to Star Labs—but whatever corporation had birthed her had apparently been quite unready to present its new line of felinoid shells to the public, as only the most average of robotic animal pets seemed to find their way into her feed’s merchandise bulletins. She could at least be grateful that her manufacturer apparently hadn’t been trying _too_ hard to find her.

With no past or identity of her own to claim—even if she _could_ somehow communicate it with her mewling—she had accepted her current designation as Selina’s newest member of the family, “Athena”, although she hadn’t yet had the opportunity to puzzle out a way of asking her why that name was chosen.

Fitting into the family had been… well, Athena wouldn’t describe it as having been _difficult_ , but it seemed there were plenty of social nuances with which one needed to come to grips when it came to sharing a living space with eight other cats, particularly when you were the one cat that _looked_ like a cat, _acted_ something more like a human, and _smelled_ like neither. Fortunately, Selina kept her orphans content enough that most of them managed to get along easily, if not famously.

After all: at the end of the day, she was still soft and warm, which meant she was just as welcome in the cuddle puddle as any of the others.

Naturally, this meant that daily life with the other cats proceeded more or less without issue—or at least she was relatively certain that their dispositions toward her were no worse than “neutral”. It did come to her as a surprise, however, that the others did not actually communicate by meowing at one another. This was of no concern; Athena did not speak cat regardless of her form, but this had still contributed in making her feel additionally alienated from the feline society that had inherited her.

But… they were just cats. As mysterious as they might be, they were still animals whose hierarchy ultimately didn’t matter in any way—and there definitely _was_ some kind of pecking order: rarely was any kitty very aggressive in any way, but every cat still appeared to be subordinate to certain others in some way, who in turn might hold junior positions relative to certain other members of their group.

And so—with everyone’s metaphorical territory marked—conflict was rare. If a war _did_ break out, it virtually never involved Athena, in large part due to the fact she had no feline pride to uphold, but perhaps also because her chassis was durable enough to withstand any attack that another might launch against her—just one of the few perks of being a human trapped within the svelte robotic form of a house cat. In any case, Selina was quick to resolve whatever issues might crop up between cats, simply because it would be too much trouble to allow feuds over food and litter rights when every cat—save Athena herself, of course—had dire need of all of those services.

An errant white tail—not her own—interrupted Athena’s contemplation, as young Crumpet joined her up onto the table where Selina had directed the displays to which Athena often devoted her attention. Most of the other quadrupedal citizens had learned to summarily ignore this holographic media in favor of more exciting pastimes (such as napping or climbing various objects which ought not be climbed), meaning she could often curl her limbs beneath her and listen undisturbed… but Crumpet would still make the occasional demands on her time, like now. Athena suspected Crumpet was—like many cats seemed to be—periodically perturbed at not maintaining a monopoly on human attention, and it was because of this that a piece of her wondered whether Crumpet somehow knew that she was more person than cat.

In any case, while it might merely have been a consequence of their matching white coats (would they still match according to the sharp eyes of the average  _felis catus_ ? _),_ Athena and Crumpet had quickly developed an affinity for one another. As he padded up to her, he affectionately brushed his whiskers into hers, and she exhibited reciprocity by licking down some of the fur on his back, which one of the other cats must have recently disturbed.

She scanned the room and was not surprised to find Batson watching them from one corner, although his gaze lacked both curiosity and attentiveness, making it apparent that his inclination toward trouble-making had been momentarily sated. Likely, he was simply pleased to have (harmlessly) bullied Crumpet out of the warm spot which he now occupied, basking in his minor victory. Were it not a rather improper and uncommunicative habit when practiced by a cat, Athena may have rolled her eyes at him.

In bearing, Batson fancied himself a proper tomcat from the streets, strutting about with an authority that most of the others contentedly pretended to defer to—but that was where any similarity to feral felines came to an end, really. After all, they were all quite thoroughly  _house_ cats, despite the freedom that Selina provided them with—certainly they might like to occasionally escape via the window and pad about the adjoining rooftops and alleyways, but this _current_ lot of kittens had heartily welcomed Selina’s domestic offerings once weighed against the cold and hungry nights that might otherwise await them in the streets of San Angeles.

But despite the overall benign consequences of Batson’s sinister motivations, Athena realized she was no longer particularly keen on remaining in the same room with him, and so decided to exercise some of the freedom she was allowed. As she leaped up to the windowsill and followed the usual path up onto the roof, she was surprised to be greeted by a moon that was full and bright, looming large in a bright gray sky that was otherwise disappointingly featureless thanks to the entire state being drowned in perpetual and radiant artificial light.

Although in some ways, that abundance of light really just made the city darker, didn’t it? There was never a harsher shadow than one cast in a blinding room.

Things were different for cats, though, weren’t they? And while Athena was not,  _strictly_ speaking, a cat, her creators had seen fit to provide her mechanical eyes with the night vision that ought to be expected in that species which she emulated—so she froze in place when she spotted a crouched silhouette waiting in the darkness cast down one side of the roof’s stairwell entrance. She remained stock still, as—with no cover whatsoever to speak of—Athena had no doubt that their visitor had spotted her long before they had reached her notice, and so her best bet would be wait for them to make the first move.

Fortunately, Athena suspected she knew  _exactly_ who might be sneaking around the roof at this time of night.

“No mewl of greeting?” came a familiar, playful voice—one that Athena was still in the process of resolving her suspicions for. Nightwing rose to his feet and stepped on out of the shadows, giving her a smile. “Didn’t think you’d see me there, Athena—hey, don’t look at me like that; I’d recognize that ribbon anywhere… if not the steel skeleton.” He paused here to give a wry smile. “I was trying not to scare off any of your friends. Selina not around?”

Athena gave him a single meow in the negative. It wasn’t unusual for Selina to be busy in the evenings, of course—her “work” was much more easily accomplished in the dark, such that it was in an urban labyrinth such as this one.

“Yeah—figured. Too bad, but… in a way, I guess you’re the one I should be talking to, anyway. Maybe I can leave her a note or something. Lucky that I happened to catch you on your way out.” He paused briefly as though having just realized something, giving himself a moment to examine the surrounding buildings before turning back to her. “Actually, isn’t it kind of unusual for you to be out on your own? Could be dangerous.”

Her response was an obedient succession of cat noises to indicate that he was correct. These sorts of nighttime outings were not a privilege she exercised very often: while she had grown more comfortable with navigating the world as a quadruped, Athena’s mastery over her body was far from perfect—although these defects might only become obvious when her movements were closely compared to her organic brethren. Whether this was a limitation of the chassis itself or a lack of familiarity on her part, she had yet no way to know.

It wasn’t as though she had retained vivid memories of stumbling about as a  _human_ , after all, even if that’s what she theoretically was supposed to be. Perhaps a humanoid body would bring with it just as much confusion as her current one.

“Guessing you didn’t exactly bring the Ouija board, did you?” asked Nightwing.

Athena met his gaze silently, almost certain that he was joking, but also somewhat pleased that he had asked, since—as tedious as it was to make use of Selina’s makeshift communication board—it was always nice to be able to speak in something besides the binary “yes” and “no” that her feline vocal range provided her. She and Nightwing also hadn’t conversed with one another very much—but part of that may have been because Athena just didn’t converse much with  _anyone_ , given the circumstances.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’. Well, that’s alright—turns out I’ve got just the thing!” he announced with a grin that was not wide enough to be creepy but too wide to be anything but genuine. “If that thing—uh, the Ouija—has been working out so far, then you must be able to spell, at least, so this should be even closer to what you need—y’know, following a little calibration.”

Seeing that he had her attention, Nightwing knelt—so that he was only towering above her half as much—and produced a device which nearly resembled a handgun, only instead of a gun-barrel there sat an opaque, angled platform the size of a large PAD, the kind that might no longer fit in one’s pockets and whose center held the minuscule but unmistakably glassy, inky darkness of a camera lens.

Apparently noticing her fixation with the thing’s single notable feature, he brought the device in a bit closer, where Athena instinctively leaned in to give it a tentative sniff, although this did not tell her anything special, because she was still not actually a cat. She met his eyes again in an attempt to prompt an explanation.

“Neat, right? Well, I guess it doesn’t look so neat right  _now_ , but…” he trailed off with good-natured sheepishness, giving himself a second to rally. “It’ll need power, but Selina’s got to have a spare jack in there somewhere. It’s tempting to let you guys plug it in and enjoy the surprise, but I’ll go ahead: this is a speech generator, with eye-tracking technology. Loads faster than that cardboard you’ve got—just look at the letters you need to put words together. It’s pretty old tech now that most of our prostheses make this kind of thing obsolete, but… should be perfect for your case, right?” he said, grinning so proudly that she could hardly help being endeared to it.

After a brief moment of thought, Athena gave him two mewls in the positive before turning to lead him back to Selina’s apartment, finding that she rather anticipated its installation.

“Oh, um… hold on a second, Athena.”

Blinking, she turned back to him, wondering what further wrinkles there could possibly be.

He smiled weakly, apparently sensing her impatience. “I mean, I can carry it—and you—back to the window, but… that might be where I have to stop. Not sure I should be going in and giving the demo while Selina’s still out, you know.”

Athena answered him with a blank stare, since his now expressing compunctions about entering unannounced was an entirely new phenomenon to her… and to him, she suspected. She let out a low meow of refusal before resuming the path back to the apartment, trusting that he would obediently follow after taking a deep breath or some such.

  
***

Athena once again sat with her legs curled beneath her as the speech device—placed conveniently beside her holofeed—underwent its (supposedly) final adjustments by Nightwing. She could not resist flicking an ear restlessly at his progress, hoping to try the device sooner rather than later, and Athena understood—for the first time—just why a cat might want to randomly strike a human with one of their soft and imprecise paws. For all their grace, cats could be rather needy and impatient creatures, and perhaps Athena had inherited these characteristics just as their society had inherited her.

“I know, I know,” said Nightwing, in response to Athena’s firm-yet-ineffectual pawing. Several of the cats had shown remarkable interest in him since his arrival, so he had needed to juggle their attention as he went about his work. He distractedly-yet-gently pushed another cat off the end table as it leaped up to usurp the speech device’s grip on his attention. “Almost there, I promise.”

She had to admit that his attention _did_ seem remarkably valuable as that of the only real human in the area, and so Athena, too, entertained herself in the interim by continuing to “hunt” him, letting her soft white paws pad encouragingly at his arms and trace the blue trim of his uniform which—for some strange reason—ran the length of several of his fingers.

“This is only going to take longer with you poking at my fingers,” he reminded her, following with a smirk as she slowly retracted her arms and shifted her tail in something of a huff, but Nightwing paid her no mind. 

Instead, he eventually gave the device a satisfied nod before laying a gloved fingertip to one of the haptic contacts along the top edge of the device, after which it sprang to life—although it perhaps did not _spring_ up so much as it laboriously rose to its feet. Either way, the blank surface of the device gradually lit up with what resembled a virtual keyboard, although the letters had been splayed out in alphabetical order. One could almost hear the camera’s motor humming as it sought input.

Nightwing grinned. “Well, looks like it—” 

“e. e. e. g. his.”  With a frankly unpleasant robotic voice and a volume that surprised the both of them, the device had begun spouting gibberish.

“Whoops, I must have—” He stopped halfway through raising a hand to his eyes. “Wait, no, it couldn’t have seen through the mask.” Nightwing proceeded to turn a knob that somewhat silenced the machine’s complaints. Through the protective glass of the device’s front panel, one could tell that the camera had angled itself nowhere in the vicinity of Nightwing’s face and—indeed—when Athena turned away from it, all speech from the archaic device came to a halt.

“Hm. Guess that means it’s working, huh?” prompted Nightwing.

Athena chanced another look at it. “ Y. E. S. Yes. ”

The vigilante let out a great sigh of relief, and was ostensibly unable to hide his pleasure. “Okay. Okay, good!” He angled the plane of the device more orthogonal to her gaze in an effort to be helpful. “To be honest, I thought it might take a little more adjusting—to make it work with eyes that aren’t strictly human, you know. Guess it’s not that complicated. You want to, uh… try getting it to say your name? It’s got  _some_ form of machine learning, so the two of you will have to learn each others’ timing; might take a little bit of work to get it started, but…”

She wasted no time in obliging his request. “ A. A. At. H. Athena. Athena. Athena. ” She repeated it several times more, the tedium and potential of inter-machine growing pains not interesting her much when juxtaposed against the excitement she felt at the prospect of no longer relying on binary mewls or padding awkwardly on Selina’s shoe-box-letter-board “Ouija”. She almost had not even noticed the strangely masculine and utilitarian technological sound of the machine’s voice—“ _almost”_ being the operative word there, since a small and grumpy part of her mind was already growing concerned with how obnoxious it was.

Athena did not let that deter her, however, and she scrambled to think of some other simple statement that she might use her gaze to dictate.

“ Than. K. Thank. You. You. N. Thank you, Night. Wing. ”

He beamed, choosing to ignore the obvious animal frustration growing upon her features. “Well, hey, it’s not a problem. We’re friends, after all. Or… acquaintances, at least. Any friend of Selina’s is a...” He very intelligently chose not to complete this sentence, no doubt having reminded himself that many of Selina’s associates would have a very hard time becoming friends with a masked vigilante.

“ I. Under. Stan. Stand. ” She quickly shifted her eyes to meet his, partly to try and communicate her gratitude subliminally and partly because using the old device was quickly proving to be an exasperating exercise in patience.

“So: what’s the first thing you’ll say to Selina when she returns? Or, for that matter: anything you’ve just been dying to say to  _me?_ Or in general?” he asked, smiling and crossing his arms as he leaned one shoulder into the adjacent wall with casual ease.

The “cat” considered this for a moment, glancing about the modest little apartment in search of something to inspire her, since it was certainly no secret that she had had  _plenty_ to think about in the weeks since her arrival here, while resigning herself to not being able to share it. A board with letters on it might serve well for saying words beyond  _yes_ or  _no,_ but its use was still too sluggish and tedious to express thoughts and feelings at length.

She looked back to Nightwing’s gift.

“ Selina and I. I. We looked up what. An. a. i. g. i. s. Is. ”

At this, his face turned to one of faint surprise—and maybe even concern. “Yeah? You remembered my asking about it, huh? I would want to look into it before jumping to anymore conclusions, but it’s true that an otherwise blank biochip showing up in an experimental Type 3 body—if you can call it that—raises a few red flags.” He paused, thoughtfully tapping a finger to his forearm as he ran it back through his mind. “You still don’t remember anything, right?”

“ Nothing. You think I. Am a chip base state. ” She hoped Nightwing understood that this was a  _question_ , since the machine’s voice—for better or worse—seemed to exhibit neither gravitas nor interroagative nuance.

“Well—like I said—I’d want to know  _more_ before saying for certain, but… maybe. Unfortunately, I don’t know how we’d actually go about learning that. Steal a biochip from the Corp that made you, perhaps? But we would have to do it somewhere in between the ‘empty’ and the ‘brain-mapped’ stage, whenever they load up whatever it is they test with. And I can’t claim to know their process, exactly. You could be a Lilim instead, you know? Maybe there’s no meaningful distinction between a Lilim and an AIgis, except that one of those is… boilerplate.” He winced at his final choice of word, no doubt wishing he had budgeted more brainpower to finding a more tactful descriptor.

“ Boilerplate ,” Athena repeated, glaring at the device with as much concentration she could muster—and as much as might allow her to complete a sentence greater than ten words. “ If I am boiler. plate. There are many of me. Many cons. Cons. Consciousness. Sleeping I hope… This is unethical. ”

Nightwing’s brow darkened, and he answered first with an imperceptible nod—less in reply to her sentence, it seemed, than in in affirmation that he was correct to be concerned. Still, Athena sensed that Nightwing was firmly on her side—an ally, to be sure. “Well, you won’t hear any disagreement from me, kitten. You seem pretty sentient to me, all things considered.”

“Yes. Not accusing. Also not kitten, but this we accept.”

He smirked. “Don’t mind being a cat, Athena?”

She gave this the somber moment of thought that it deserved. “ We would prefer humanoid. body. But there exist worse fates than cat. ”

He laughed. “You can say that again,” he replied, relaxing into a smile that was rather more sympathetic. “I can’t promise that we’ll find the answers you deserve, Athena—but I can promise that we’ll look for them. Until then, it seems like you’ve got a pretty good place to call home, so… try not to let it weigh on you too much, alright?”

She nodded, understanding quite fully that—while consideration was  _good—_ there was little to be gained by worrying over the things she could not control. A fine realization, really, since there was—in fact—very little you could control without opposable thumbs.


End file.
